Lifeboat Foundation

When you’re building wearables and glowables, sometimes a flashy rainbow animation is all you need. [Geeky Faye] likes to go a little further, however, and built this impressive necklace that serves to inform on the local air quality.

The necklace consists of a series of Neopixel LED strips, housed within a tidy 3D printed housing made with flexible filament. A dovetail joint makes putting on and removing the necklace a cinch. A TinyPico V2, based on the ESP32, runs the show, as it’s very small and thus perfect for the wearable application. A USB power bank provides power to the microcontroller and LEDs.

Continue reading “Breathe Easy With This LED Air Sensor Necklace” »

Your appliances, car and home are designed to make your life easier and automate tasks you perform daily: switch lights on and off when you enter and exit a room, remind you that your tomatoes are about to go bad, personalize the temperature of the house depending on the weather and preferences of each person in the household.

To do their magic, they need the internet to reach out for help and correlate data. Without internet access, your smart thermostat can collect data about you, but it doesn’t know what the weather forecast is, and it isn’t powerful enough to process all of the information to decide what to do.

But it’s not just the things in your home that are communicating over the internet. Workplaces, malls and cities are also becoming smarter, and the smart devices in those places have similar requirements. In fact, the Internet of Things (IoT) is already widely used in transport and logistics, agriculture and farming, and industry automation. There were around 22 billion internet-connected devices in use around the world in 2018, and the number is projected to grow to over 50 billion by 2030.

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet kit is going up from $499 to $549 for waiting deposit holders, and to $599 for new customers.

Russia is forcing Google to delist URLs associated with virtual private networks, or VPNs, but almost half a million Russians are downloading the technology that allows them to obscure their internet usage and access government-blocked websites.

Clearly, Russians are looking for uncensored information about their government’s war against Ukraine.

“Surfshark conducted an analysis showing that the Russian telecoms regulator (Roskomnadzor) has forced Google to delist more than 36,000 URLs that link to VPN services over the past month,” a Surfshark representative told me via email. (The company offers a VPN product.) “The most significant spike of requests was recorded amid the second week of the war, when the Kremlin banned various media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, while others left due to a ‘fake news’ law.”

If we are to set up a permanent base on the Moon, we will need some solid connection.

A space startup company is trying to make that happen. Aquarian Space recently announced receiving $650,000 in seed funding to develop a possible broadband internet connection that would link the Earth to the Moon, and maybe even Mars.

The company aims to deploy its first communications system to the Moon by 2024 in anticipation of increased demand from planned space missions to the Moon and beyond, both public and private ventures.

Continue reading “Space WiFi? A new startup wants to give NASA’s moonbase an internet connection” »

Elon Musk sent Starlink satellite Internet service to Ukraine. It seems to be helping.

As Russia moves toward a highly censored and tightly controlled internet amid its invasion of Ukraine, citizens are finding ways to bypass restrictions.

March 16 (Reuters) — Telecoms giant Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) said on Wednesday it had secured new business worth almost $1 billion from the U.S. Department of Defense to provide technical support and network modernization services.

The deal includes contracts for services to the Pentagon, the National Capital Region (NCR) and Fort Belvoir at a combined value of $966.5 million.

Verizon will provide internet-protocol-based services, voice and video services and network-related support aimed at accelerating the department’s digital pivot.